


become a bar mitzvah

by pinkejessman



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, F/M, Other, but also i have too many issues so now im just sad, fuck my life i have myself, this is about me using jake to work through my issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-14 21:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9204872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinkejessman/pseuds/pinkejessman
Summary: Dad has him sit in the backseat. They sit in the backseat when Mom’s not home and the garage door is shut with the clicker. Dad lets Jake click it.





	

The car is his dad’s pride and joy, and Jake is seven years old. Dad lets him sit in the front seat and pretend to be driving, while he messes around with the engine or the wheels, and it’s really cool.

Dad has him sit in the backseat. They sit in the backseat when Mom’s not home and the garage door is shut with the clicker. Dad lets Jake click it. Jake’s starting to get a little hesitant around the car, because sometimes they only do the first one, and sometimes the second one, and sometimes it’s both so he never knows when he’s going to have a good day or a bad one and the one time he asked Dad they had to get in the backseat right then.

It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s not something he wants to tell his mom. Sometimes she gets really upset when Jake runs into a wall or the edge of the table and gets a big cut, so it’s probably best not to bother her with this. She might yell at him if this turns out to be a bad thing he’s doing, and if not he’s gonna end up tied to her in a lifelong three legged race, she’ll get so worked up. When he hit his head she made him wear a helmet for four days.

Jake is seven years old. His Little League team is winning more than they’re losing, and he has a bunch of friends. Gina in his class lives right by Nana, so they hang out sometimes, even though she’s bossy. Everyone at school likes him.

He’s keeping the peace at home. His dad likes him and his mom and dad like each other right now.

 

It starts winding down at some point.

 

At one point, he goes looking to hang out with his dad when Mom is having a Ladies Party, and his dad is in the back seat with Sheila Bodden. He throws up the minute he gets back in the house and he doesn’t know why. His mom sends all the ladies home with little sandwiches she made and feeds him the rest, tucking him into his bed and fussing over him for the next few days while he cries himself out. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t tell anyone about his dad. It still doesn’t seem right, and it’s Sheila, and it just makes it more of a bad idea.

“I’m sorry,” he tells his mom, over and over. She shushes him.

 

When Dad leaves he leaves the car. He says it’s until he finds a place he can keep it. He comes back to visit sometimes, but now Sean’s dad is coaching baseball and Jake figures he’s getting too old for that. Dad takes him to movies when he comes. He looks at Jake out of the corner of his eye and Jake’s stomach shifts. Dad buys him ice cream and takes him home.

 

The year Jacob Peralta becomes a man is his first year not at his mom’s school. It’s different, and he likes the rush of running down the hall and the throwing pencils at people, and most people at school like him. It’s worth going, at least, even though Old Yeller is the most messed up book in the history of the world and Gina had to sit with him for an hour while he cried drafting his essay. Homework’s not great. It comes back with grease stains and holes from erasers a lot of the time.

All in all, he’s having a good time.

His dad comes to his bar mitzvah. He stumbles through the Torah and tries to make a joke out of it, and some of the aunts give him dirty looks, but his cousins giggle and dance with him after. His mom keeps checking the pins on his yarmulke and says “You’re the man of the house now”, even though those two things seem kind of contradictory. 

Jenny Gildenhorn, who he passed notes to in Hebrew school for the past year, and then held hands with at school, and maybe kissed a little bit behind the bleachers at a school dance, breaks up with him. He’d shrug it off, but the shoulders of his suit don’t fit right. It’s another one of those things about his life that just ends, like that, all the bad things building up inside of him until it just goes POP! and it’s over.

Maybe it’s not over. His dad comes to his bar mitzvah. He leaves, ruffling Jakes hair, (his mother rushes over, hands aflutter,) and taking the envelopes full of money.

This is what being a man is. Jake thinks it’s kind of a dick move. His mom tells him to watch his mouth, and then tells him she’s so sorry that everything happens like this. Jake doesn’t know what to do with that.

The year Jake becomes a man he is up and down with teenage hormones and all these different things happening.

 

“I’m okay. Um, I was wondering about, if, y’know, maybe if you were going to give my money back?” He crosses his legs under him and fights the urge to lay his head down in the kitchen table. He’s alone after school a lot of the time. Mom works late and Gina’s in all these clubs and Nana is a busy lady.

“Oh, Jako-” His dad chuckles uncomfortably, the way he does when he rubs the back of his neck. Jake can see it now. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know if I can do that. You know how it is.”

“I actually don’t, because I don’t have any money.”

Dad sighs. “I’ll do my best, okay? I just needed it. How much were you gonna keep? If I know your mom, most of it was for college.”

He’s exactly right. “Just the stuff from the aunts.”

“How much is that?” Jake tells him. He’d counted before stuffing the envelopes away, where he thought they’d be safe. “Okay. Okay, I’ll send you that much of stuff, okay? That’s good?”

“Sure, Dad.”

 

About a week later, there’s a man waiting down the block from school, right at the point where Jake turns off the main street. He looks vaguely familiar, like someone Jake hasn’t seen in a few years, and as the guy gets closer and waves he figures it out. One of his dad’s friends, from the group that would come over for football and chips. 

“Hey!” he says. Jake stares at him. “Your dad sent me.”

“You have my money?” Jake guesses, because this is starting to be weird, that they’re just looking at each other here on the sidewalk.

The guy laughs. “Some of it. Hope that’s okay. Couldn’t get it together all at once.”

Jake handwaves it. “It’s fine, he’s stopped being an asshole about it.” He steps forward, backpack bouncing against him.

Then the man smiles at him, grabs him by the shoulder, and pulls him to the side of the house they’re in front of. Jake kicks a little, sputtering protests, smacking at the guy’s arm, but it doesn’t help. The guy just ignores him, shoves harder at him, holds him in place once Jake’s on his knees.

“Stop squirming,” he growls. “Dude, your dad said you’d go with it-”

He’s not crying, that’s just what happens after this kind of thing where you can’t breathe. He ends up with two crisp twenties, a crisp five, and three rumpled ones. He stares at it for a long time after the guy fucks off, smiling. 

Twenty eight dollars. His payment. And his tip.

He wonders if his dad sent the money and his friend just decided he was getting something out of the deal, or if this was how his dad decided to earn the money.

Letting Jake earn the money.

He’s owed a lot more than twenty eight bucks.

 

It stops being about the money and starts being about his dad. It’s more than that guy. His dad hasn’t visited in a while. He’s been busy. Jake’s been busy. He looked it up: what he’s doing is illegal and he can’t deal with that right now. His mom hasn’t been in a state to deal with anything, recently, and he doesn’t want to deal with the cops. 

He’s wanted to be a cop for a little bit now. It’s unrelated. He’s got his Uncle Bob’s collection of cop movies at home, and every Christmas it’s Die Hard and Chinese food.

No one ever comes to the house. He locks the doors and the windows, tries to trust that the snoopy nice neighbors make him safe, even though they didn’t notice his dad. Closed garage door.

 

The last day before spring break none of Gina’s things are happening after school. That happens sometimes, but never on a day where they’re allowed to stay up as late as they want watching TV, so it’s cool that they’re walking back together. Gina knows all of the gossip, which is really interesting. Who’s dating who. Who’s fighting who. Jake’s mostly focused on the fun stuff, but Gina’s some kind of genius.

Gina’s looking over her shoulder at him, so she sees the exact moment he stops in his tracks and his eyes glaze over, because a man is crossing the street and shouting his name, like they’re friends. The way Gina yells his name. 

“Who’s this, Jakey?” she asks, bumping her arm against his. He stammers a little. The man is looking at Gina in a way he doesn’t like.

“Hey, doll,” he says. When he tries to touch Jake’s hair he ducks, so the guy reaches for Gina’s ponytail. 

Jake doesn’t know what to do. He takes Gina’s hand. She doesn’t make fun of him. He thinks she knows that this is a big thing right now, bigger than him, and it doesn’t mean anything-

 

“Jake and I need pepper spray and knives,” Gina says, two hours later when his mom comes home and is relaxing because she doesn’t have to teach for the next week. Every year she says “Thank G-d for the dead Jesus,” and then Jake has to think about how Jesus hasn’t even come yet and chocolate is good and it’s great to have his mom home.

His mom doesn’t really understand, but that weekend they get matching little blades and canisters to add to their latchkey kid keychains. Gina quits all of her clubs, reschedules her social life for days off, and every day they walk to Nana’s apartment, curl up on the floor, eat snacks and do nice things.

It takes about a month for his dad to call. Gina picks up the phone, screams “FUCK YOU” into the receiver so loud that Nana comes running out of her room. Jake lays down on the couch and does his homework. Gina doesn’t get in trouble because there’s something in her gaze and the way she moves to sit next to him.

 

He has a gun now. It’s part of his uniform. 

 

He and Amy sit on the couch in the girl’s apartment while she catches her breath. Her face is red, wet, her eyes are swollen with tears and mascara that Jake would think she’s too young for but she’s thirteen, so. She won’t look away from them even as she shakes, and Jake can’t focus on anything else. He can hear Terry slam the dad against the kitchen wall and bark out his rights, hear Charles nervous-humming as the guy gets ushered out the apartment and shoved down the stairs. They’d seemed to notice the way Jake just. Stopped working. As soon as the dad incriminated himself and bolted. Amy has to stay with the girl- there’s a rule- and she just prodded Charles into the kitchen and pulled Jake next to her. 

“What your name?” she asks the girl. They already know. It’s Casey. Thirteen, parents divorced, split custody, reports to both CPS and 911 by her chemistry teacher who was worried about the dead eyes and the bruises on her collarbone. 

She looks small. Jake hasn’t been around kids like this in a while, so maybe he doesn’t have an accurate idea of what thirteen year olds are.

She doesn’t talk. He lets Amy take the girl back in the car and tips the Uber driver for not asking why a guy with a badge and gun is just riding around the city.

 

“It’s okay,” he tells the girl. “You don’t have to tell us anything right now if you can’t.” She’s curled in the corner of the briefing room while he stands just in the doorway. His throat feels dry.

She’s started crying again. He’s halfway there himself. He sits down, right there, and she jerks a little bit at the movement, so he handcuffs himself to the doorknob. Then he realizes he doesn’t have the key. That probably makes it less of an empty gesture, though, so he tells the girl that and waits.

She doesn’t say anything.

“It gets better after a while,” he says. “It’s, it’s not that you forget it, exactly, but you can grow up and you’re not a kid anymore and you get a gun.” He considers that. “My gun’s in my desk right now.” 

“Okay,” she whispers. “Can I live with my mom?”

“Sure thing,” he says. “Do you wanna talk to Detective Santiago now?”

She shakes her head. “I think I trust you.”

 

Taking the statement is enough to make him dry heave in the bathroom after, especially once Rosa reminds him, trying to stay calm, that they’ll need. Medical. Evidence, and such. So he leaves the room while they take her away for that and Amy’s unlocked his hand. He did it, though. Casey is going to go live with her mom. Her mom cried on the phone. She lives a little out of the city and she’ll be here in a few hours. 

Amy rubs his back while he works through it. She kisses his left cheek, right cheek, both over and over and over and then his forehead once gently. Then they go sit with the girl until her mom comes and he starts crying. She and Amy talk about books, a little. 

They go home in silence. He takes a really long shower because he wants his head to fog up and his skin to get all tight and hot until he feels like a different person. When he gets out and gets dressed, rubbing his hair off, rubbing his face raw with Amy’s nice clean yellow towel, she’s got food laid out on their bed. Display temperature pizza and cartons of Chinese.

“Do you want to watch Die Hard?” she asks, and she knows, and he loves her a lot. She must love him a lot, too, if she’s willing to go through the hassle of talking to the pizza guy to get the exact right kind, and if she’s going to overlook the sauces in the bed and him shouting yippee-ki-yay even though they both get a little weirded out by how excitedly he says the last word and then it’s uncomfortable for a while before he says “I like your mom” and she says “What if the neighbors heard”.

He navigates himself around the food, the towel she’s put down- it matches the yellow one he’s got around his shoulders, he loves Amy so much- and rests his head on her thigh. He closes his eyes and breathes out a shaky breath.

“I love you,” he says. “Like, a lot.”

“It’s okay,” she says.

“There might be another reason I can’t have sex in cars in garages,” he tells her. 

“It’s okay,” she says.

She hands the remote to Jake, and he clicks the button.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really sorry? I've been thinking about this a lot when I'm having, the flashbacks, and I realize now that it doesn't mesh very well with the actual show even though I think in different circumstances it could have, so. I've tried to keep all the details and timelines right. If you liked this disaster you can contact me @noajosef on twitter.


End file.
